Living the artist’s life in New York City. I am the Artistic Director of Treehouse Shakers, a non-profit dance and theater company, which I co-founded 20 years ago. I am also a writer, director, actor, storyteller, tree hugger and mother. Creativity is my everyday roadmap. www.treehouseshakers.com

Treehouse Shakers

Hatched, BAM Fisher, Hillman Studio

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

This week's post is from a wonderful colleague, writer and visionary, Kim Peter Kovac. It felt necessary to include Kim's blog post, exposing the rich landscape of theater for young audiences. It is within this landscape that Treehouse Shakers' is constantly navigating, as we also push our own artistic boundaries and visions. May the field, that Kim so eloquently explains, continue to emerge, shape, change and grow.

By Kim Peter Kovac

In the world of theater for young audiences,
the ground is shifting under our feet: unstable and unfamiliar, far less
funding, and the zeitgeist is way different than just a few years ago. As we
look ahead, we have little idea what the future will look like. This is very
scary.

And very exciting.

There are changes afoot in all the corners of
our field, both in the United States and internationally. New paradigms of work
are being driven by individuals, by theaters, and by service organizations;
some are reactive, some proactive. Some stem very directly from the ongoing
worldwide economic situation, but certainly not all, as some have been bubbling
up for years. Since change precedes insight, and pattern recognition is an
inexact science, we can’t even recognize all the changes that are emerging. Here
are a few that we can.

Organizational Tectonics/USA

The three major organizations dedicated to
performances for young audiences and theater education in North America are
slowly but surely creaking their way together toward more mutual acceptance and
cooperation.

These are the American Alliance for Theater
and Education (AATE, primarily, as you might imagine, theater educators at all
levels); International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY, primarily presenters at
performing arts centers, agents, and touring types) and Theater for Young
Audiences/USA (primarily producers and others from the TYA regionals). While
some individuals and theaters are part of two of the organizations, probably
few are in all three.

A few years back, the three
organizations operated individually, in their own silos, and even people not
influenced by long-standing feuds or misperceptions tended to operate within
fairly narrow rails. It’s way different now—the leaders of the three
organizations are communicating regularly and making a point of attending each
others’ major events. Across the map, we are moving toward open collaboration
on significant projects, and ongoing exploration of future collaborations.

Organizational
Tectonics/International

It’s not news that the world is changing and
becoming far more interconnected, and it’s heartening to see how much our TYA
theaters—all over the world—are embracing and collaborating with work from
other countries and cultures.

The major international service organization
for TYA companies is ASSITEJ (a French acronym), the international association
of theaters for children and young people, with national centers in eighty-plus
countries. Ten years ago, this organization, founded during the Cold War, had a
strong undercurrent of national politics and elitism, the feeling that that the
gold standard was European text-based theater, performed by adults for young
audiences. Something not always clear to people in the United States is how, in
some countries, being affiliated with ASSITEJ is way more significant than
affiliation with the theater service organizations in this country.

Much of that has changed, some organically:
there’s an openness to diversity of art forms and cultures and a realization of
the importance of arts education and youth theater (performed by young people
for young people). Additionally, recent constitutional changes have broken the
cycle of exclusion caused by participation in the organization being limited to
only those who are members of sometimes restrictive national centers. Now, participation
is far more open, an artist or a theater can be an individual member of the
international association, or you can participate through networks of
researchers or playwrights. In the future, people will have far greater choice
in their national and international networking, and artistic maps are being
drawn. Practitioners may choose to network by country, region, profession, or interest,
such as theater for the very young or theater for social change.

New
Ways of Creating New Work

Not too long ago, touring performances for
young audiences and presenters lived, for the most part, in a straightforward
transactional model. Presenters, working through agents, bought shows that
producers created. A few of the producing TYA theaters did some touring, and almost
none of them presented work.

There are new models taking shape now.

In addition to more co-productions (happening
in all the pockets of theater in the United States), a number of our TYA producing
theaters are beginning to present touring work and realize it’s a way to
enhance offerings, save money, and not dilute their own artistic product. Additionally
some producing theaters are exploring what might be called run-outs or
sit-downs, where an in-house production would not tour in the traditional sense
but have an extended run at one or two presenting houses.

Major presenting houses, including the New
Victory Theater in New York and PlayhouseSquare Center in Cleveland, have
created terrific programs to help develop new work. IPAY has just launched a major program toward the same end.

Any of a number of theaters whose audiences
are primarily adults are now commissioning and producing work specifically for
young audiences of families, more and more each year. One example: last year
the Barrymore for outstanding production of a musical was won by the Arden Theatre
for its commissioned version of Hans Christian Andersen’s little-known story, The Flea and the Professor. Another: Lydia
Diamond’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The
Bluest Eye was commissioned by Steppenwolf for Young Adults and transferred
to the New Victory Theater in New York City.

Increased
Inclusion of Art Forms and Artists

Our colleagues in Australia use the acronym
TYP, or theater for young people, to include pretty much any performance for
young audiences—including but not limited to theater, dance, music, puppetry,
circus, physical theater, and others—essentially any performance that occurs in
a theater. The TYA world in the United States is becoming more and more open to
both using other art forms as part of our ongoing theater work, as well as not
being so strict in defining what “theater” is.

There’s a part of live performance that might
be called “theater by, for, with, and about persons who are Deaf or with disabilities”
(try saying that quickly three times). It’s often called “disability arts” internationally,
is now being called “inclusive arts” by some our colleagues in the United Kingdom.
Whatever you call it, there’s more and more focus on this part of our field,
and our ways of defining it are being broadened. A recent international
convening in Washington around this subject has begun to open new connections.

Leadership
Transitions

There’s been talk for a number of years around
the (sadly clichéd) phrase “the greying of the field.” Two recent transitions,
though, strike a particularly resonant chord: Roger Bedard has retired from the
terrific Child Drama program at Arizona State University and Onny Huisink and
Saskia Janse have stepped back from artistic leadership of the exemplary Speeltheater
Holland.

Buckle your seat belts, because it’s likely a
lot of folk who have been essential to the growth of the field will be stepping
back soon. It’s not appropriate to name them (the evidence is anecdotal and
speculative), but trust me on this one. The chatter used to be about how it
didn’t seem we were seeing the next generation of artists, managers, and
educators. They’re out there though, and in some ways better equipped to move
the field forward than when those of my generation were twenty and thirty-somethings—the
training and mentoring exist at much higher levels and the field is far more
accepted than back in the day.

In a just a few years, though, the names of
the leadership will be very different, and we know they’ll be taking the field down
exciting new roads

The
Emerging Emergence

A quick and dirty
(and somewhat broad) definition of emergence is that it’s the
way complex systems and patterns
arise out of a multiplicity of relatively
simple interactions, where the group is smarter than any one individual, where
the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. There are any number of
examples of emergence we can point to in the US theater world, including, the
rise of the regional theaters in the fifties, embracing nontraditional/colorblind
casting in the seventies, renewed focus on playwrights, and new work in the
nineties.

Reading the tea leaves, it seems clear we’re presently
in the midst of another great emergence in theater for young audiences, all
over the world. As with all emergences, there are some key players but really, it’s
led by no one and everyone.

One way to look at these winds of change is to remember that at
the start of a voyage, prudent sailors write in their log books “From A toward
B.” Think about that for a moment—not “From Ato B,” but “From Atoward
B.” It’s breathtaking in its simplicity and wisdom, all the more so since it
should be obvious. During a sea journey conditions may well change, forcing
sailors to reconsider not only the course, but even the destination.

We’re in this soup (read: voyage) together and
need to recognize that while it can be scary that we can’t control everything
swirling around us, we can control more than we think. Our old ways of mapping
our practice may not be viable, but we’re creating new ones. It’s a great
adventure with a bright and exciting future, just over the horizon.

Kim Peter Kovac is the Producing Director of Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, Vice-President of ASSITEJ International, on the boards of TYA/USA, and co-founding editor of “Write Local. Play Global.” the international TYA playwrights network.

Originally posted January 27, 2013 on HowlRound, a Center for Theater Commons. www.howlround.com, this piece is being reposted with permission.

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About Me

Originally from Wyoming, Mara co-founded Treehouse Shakers. She has written, directed, and sometimes acted in Treehouse Shakers' 14 original dance-plays, 6 of which are on a rotating tour. In 1999, Mara co-created Niñopalooza, an all day rock concert for kids, and Niño Nada, a festival of children’s theatrical work acclaimed by the New York Times. Awarded “Best Storyteller of New York” by the NY Press, Mara has performed throughout the U.S. and is the featured teller for F.I.T’s Toy Design Depart, and has been a teller for Baby Gap, Miramax, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Turtle Pond Publications, Chocolate Sauce Publishing, The Tribeca Film Festival, to name a few. Currently, she is a writer, voice-over artist and story consultant for Activity Works, an interactive educational web series for classrooms across the U.S. Mara was also the subject for a qualitative dissertation on the inclusion of storytelling in the classroom by Dr. Barb O’Neill. Some favorite acting credits include; Bloomsday on Broadway, featured on NPR and The Sandpiper at Symphony Space. She has performed with MTC, Playwrights Theater, Eugene O’Neill by-the-Sea-Festival, Provincetown Playhouse, among others.